News from the Votemaster

An
Ipsos poll
released yesterday gave Joe Biden a victory over Paul Ryan of 42% to 35%, with
the rest undecided. Biden also won the CBS snap poll 50% to 31% but lost the CNN
snap poll 44% to 48%.
However, CNN later said that its poll had about 8% too many Republicans in it, so Biden probably won all three major snap pollss.

The Romney campaign has been saving its pennies for this moment. All year long,
Obama has been spending at a record rate and Romney hasn't responded.
Now the response is coming.The Romney campaign is going to
double and triple
its ad budget in key swing states. Whether a voter who sees 15 ads an hour rather
than 5 is more likely to be convinced remains to be seen. At some point
saturation sets in. Also, Obama is not helpless in the face of this coming
barrage, since he raised $181 million in August.

One of Mitt Romney's main campaign promises is that he would reduce tax rates
by 20% and make up the lost revenue by eliminating deductions. Now the Joint
Committee on Taxation, the official, nonpartisan scorekeeper on tax policy has
issued
a report on the subject. If Romney were to eliminate deductions for mortgage
interest, charitable contributions, and state and local taxes, the amount of
revenue recovered from them would allow the rates to be reduced only 4%, not 20%,
from the rates that will be in effect next year if Congress does nothing. This
would mean a top rate of 38% (vs. 35% now and 39.6% under Bill Clinton).

Democrats immediately seized on the report saying a 20% rate reduction would
increase the deficit, something Romney opposes. Republicans attacked the report,
saying there are other deductions that could be eliminated, such as employer-provided
health insurance. Removing all these deductions, however is likely to generate
massive opposition. It is doubtful that Congress could muster the will to pull
it off.

Gallup has recognized that more and more people use cell phones as their
primary phone, even if they have a landline, and will henceforth
make half
of its calls to cell phones to avoid missing these people.
Gallup's decision was immediately denounced by Republican groups, which fear
new polls will included too many young people, a majority of whom are Democrats.
However, Gallup, like all pollsters, normalizes its polls to make sure they have
an age distribution that reflects the population of (likely) voters.

Another sign that the economy is recovering is that consumer confidence in
the economy is at the
highest level
in 5 years according to the October University of Michigan survey.
Rising stock and property prices as well as falling unemployment are responsible
for consumer having a brighter outlook.
It is expected that an improving economy will blunt one of Mitt Romney's key
arguments: that Obama has mismanaged the economy.

Over the course of his career, Paul Ryan has benefited from $3 million
from the finance, insurance, and real estate sectors. He started out as a
speechwriter for conservative representative Jack Kemp, which gained him
attention from these industries. His support of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act,
which deregulated the banks earned him more credit with them and his voting
to bail out the banks, at a time when many conservatives opposed the bailout,
made him a hero to the banks and the money flowed.